At the next corner she stopped, gasping for breath, and held on to a lamp-post for support. The sign on the post read Figueroa Street. I am not lost, she thought. I know Figueroa Street, I will wait here on the corner until an empty taxicab comes along. But something in her mind, some sixth sense, warned her not to stand still, and she started out again. Not running. The running had attracted too much attention. She must be casual, ordinary. No one must find out that somewhere, along these streets, or other streets, she had lost the day. It was night. The day had gone, passed her by, passed without touching her.
She walked on, her head bent, as if she were searching the sidewalk and the gutters for her lost day. People passed, the cars roared by, the night was filled with noise and light and movement, but Miss Clarvoe did not raise her head. I must pretend, she thought. I must pretend not to know I’m being followed.
If she was clever enough, if she could control her panic, she might be able to find out who it was. Bella? The old man who’d caught her talking to herself? One of Bella’s friends? None of them had anything to gain by following her, not even money. She had lost her purse, along with the day.
A bus was unloading at the next intersection and she quickened her pace and mingled with the crowd that was getting off the bus. Secure for a moment, she looked back, peering through the moving jungle of faces. Only one face stood out among the others, pale, composed, half smiling. Evelyn Merrick. She was standing in the shadowed doorway of a small TV repair shop, leaning idly against the plate glass window as if she had just paused for a rest during an evening stroll. But Miss Clarvoe knew it was not an evening stroll, it was a chase, and she was the beast in view.
She turned and began to run across the street, blind and deaf and numb with panic. She did not even feel the impact of the car that struck her.
When she returned to consciousness she was lying against the curb and people were standing over her, all talking at once.
“Saw her with my own eyes, out she dashed...”
“Red light...”
“Drunk, for sure. You can smell it a mile away.”
“Honest to God, I didn’t see her!”
“Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to be called as a witness.”
“Come on, Joe, come on. I just can’t stand the sight of blood.”
Blood, Miss Clarvoe thought. I’m bleeding, then. It’s all come true, what she said to me the first night. She saw it in her crystal ball, I was to be in an accident, bleeding, mutilated.
“What’s a little blood, you watch prize-fights all the time, don’t you?”
“Must of been drunk...”
“With my own eyes...”
“Somebody call an ambulance.”
“The lady in the green hat went to phone her husband; he’s a doctor.”
A young man wearing a cab-driver’s uniform took off his coat and tried to put it under Miss Clarvoe’s head. She thrust it away and sat up painfully. “I’m all right. Leave me alone.”
The words were muffled and indistinct, but the young man heard them. “You’re supposed to lie there until the doctor comes.”
“I don’t need a doctor.”
“I took a course in first aid and it says that in the book. Keep the patient warm and...”
“I’m not hurt.” She dragged herself to her feet and began wiping the moisture off her face with a handkerchief, not knowing which was blood and which was sweat from all the running she’d done.
The crowd began to disperse — the show was over, no one was killed, too bad, better luck next time.
Only the young man in the cabbie’s uniform lingered on, looking fretful. “It wasn’t my fault. Everyone could see it wasn’t my fault. You dashed right out in front of my cab, didn’t give me a chance to stop, craziest thing I ever saw in my life.”
Miss Clarvoe looked back at the doorway of the shop where she’d seen Evelyn Merrick just before the accident. The girl had left. Or else she had stepped farther back into the shadows to wait. That was the game she played best, waiting in shadows, walking in the night, watching for the unwary.
The cabbie was still talking, aggrieved and belligerent. “Everyone could see I did the best I could. I stopped, didn’t I? I tried to minister first aid, didn’t I?”
“Oh stop it, stop it! There’s no time for argument. No time, I tell you.”
He stepped back looking surprised. “I don’t get...”
“Listen to me. What’s your name?”
“Harry. Harry Reis.”
“Listen Harry, I must get away from here. I’m being followed. She was — I saw her in that doorway over there a few minutes ago. She intends to kill me.”
“You don’t say.” A faint derisive smile stretched his mouth. He didn’t even glance back at the doorway she was pointing at. “Maybe you escaped from somewheres, huh?”
“Escaped?”
“Sure. Escaped. Climbed over the wires.”
She shook her head in mystification. He seemed to be talking in riddles like the fat woman, Bella. Monkeys on the back, little animals running around, wires to climb over. They were all English words but Miss Clarvoe couldn’t understand them. She thought, perhaps I am the foreigner, perhaps I have been out of touch too long; the language has changed, and the people. The world has been taken over by the Bellas, and the Evelyn Merricks, and little men like Harry with sly, insinuating smiles. I must get back to my own room and lock the door against the ugliness.
“I must...”
“Sure,” Harry said. “Sure. Anything for a lady.”
He led the way to his cab. Miss Clarvoe dropped the bloody handkerchief on the curb and followed him. She wasn’t aware yet of any pain, only of a terrible stiffness that seemed to cover her entire body like a plaster cast.
She got into the back seat of the cab and pulled her coat close around her. She remembered the blonde girl in Bella’s place asking what was so special about fabric imported from Scotland. Miss Clarvoe didn’t know, and it seemed important for her to figure it out. There were sheep, plenty of sheep, all over the world, but perhaps the Scottish sheep had finer wool. Wool. Sheep. Blackshear. She had forgotten about Mr. Blackshear. He was miles and years away, she couldn’t even recall his face except that it looked a little like her father’s.
The inside of the cab was dark and warm and the radio was turned on to a panel discussion on politics. All of the people on the panel had very definite ideas, firmly spoken, all of them knew exactly where the day had gone and what to expect from the night.
Harry got in and turned the radio off. “Where to?”
“The Monica Hotel.”
“You live there?”
“Yes.”
“You been living there long?”
“Yes.”
“All the time steady?”
“Yes.”
She could tell he didn’t believe her. What did he believe? What were the wires she was supposed to have climbed over? She had never seen Harry before, never, she was sure of that. Yet he acted as though he knew secrets about her, ugly secrets.
“I will pay you,” she said. “I have money in my hotel suite.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll send the boy down with it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She knew from his tone that he didn’t expect any money, that he was humoring her as he would any drunk or liar or madman who happened to be his passenger. The customer is always right.
The headlights of the car following shone into the rear-view mirror and Miss Clarvoe saw Harry’s face for a minute quite clearly. It was young and pleasant and very, very honest. A nice, open face. No one would suspect what kind of mind lay behind it. The fat woman wore her malice and her miseries for all the world to see; Harry’s were hidden underneath the youthful blandness of his face like worms at the core of an apple that looks sound from the outside.